Take a look at any 2014 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray and you’ll find a hint previewing a feature newly available for 2015. Just behind the inside rearview mirror, there’s a little notch cut into the window tint. If you had asked Chevrolet people about it, they’d just shrug.

The shrugging is over. The notch exists to allow a small, forward-facing 720p HD digital video camera to record what it sees, with the images stored on an SD card that fits into a slot inside the glove compartment. An 8GB card will hold about 200 minutes of footage; a 32GB card, 600 minutes.

That alone is neat and a potential blow to GoPro business. But the Stingray’s Performance Data Recorder (PDR) is no mere Russian dash cam. It does a whole lot more, with a dedicated GPS receiver operating at 5 Hz, or five times faster than the typical in-dash navigation system. So in addition to recording video and in-car sound, the PDR knows where it is. Developed with Cosworth, the data-logging supplier for the Corvette factory race team, the PDR is also connected to the car’s Controller Area Network (CAN), allowing it to record 30 channels of information, including engine rpm, transmission-gear selection, braking force, and steering-wheel angle.

The system operates in four modes. In Touring, it simply records nice Sunday-drive video with no data overlay. In Track, you get all the data available on screen, including speed, rpm, g-force, a location-based map, lap time, and more. Sport shows fewer details on the overlay, but includes key data such as speed and g-force. And in Performance mode, you get pure performance metrics such as 0-to-60-mph acceleration, quarter-mile speed and elapsed time, and even 0-100-0-mph runs. You could build a comparable video-data system from aftermarket suppliers like Stack, but with the Stingray’s PDR, it’s all hard-wired and covered by Chevrolet’s warranty.

All of this is shown on the dashboard’s eight-inch color screen in real time. You can review the video and data via the screen, although you must be stopped for it to operate. You can download the data to your computer from the SD card, and you can also upload it to Cosworth Toolbox telemetry software similar to that used by Corvette Racing, to improve driver technique and lap times. The PDR will be available at the start of regular 2015 Corvette production, which should be late in the third quarter of 2014. Pricing hasn’t been announced, but we gather that you’d be close if you guessed $2000.

We tried the PDR on three Stingrays at Sebring International Raceway. One was a regular production car, the other two were ex-Indianapolis 500 pace cars. The system was balky on one, it recorded video without data on the second car, and worked perfectly on the third. There will be a lot of time between our test drive and the start of production, so we expect that PDR will be right when it’s available to the public.

The Cosworth Toolbox software, in action.

As we idled down pit lane, we discovered that there’s enough latitude built into the system that you can mark the start-finish line on the touch screen from there, rather than having to do it at speed on the track. And you only have to do so once. In Track mode, you’ll see a small map of the track displayed at the top left on which your position is marked. In the middle, you’ll see your current your speed (we touched 144 mph on Sebring’s back straight), while the far right shows your current gear. G-force, engine speed, and steering angle are displayed across the bottom. Once out of the car, we discovered that the in-car sound is fairly muted, although perhaps there’s a setting for volume that we didn’t find. (In any event, we’d request more noise as a default from the final iteration of PDR.) Using Cosworth Toolbox, we checked out lap-by-lap data and punched up corner comparisons, and you have the option of syncing your racing-line data to a small inset video.

Warning, crappy drivers: You might want to record using the simpler Touring mode and just tell your friends you forgot to push the button for Track. That way, you will look like you’re going fast without any pesky data to disagree—because there’s nowhere to hide with all the numbers visible. And maybe don’t share on YouTube until you use the information to improve.

Chevrolet has the first rights to Cosworth’s system, but the British firm is talking to other OEMs as well as GoPro for future applications. Chevy is also investigating how difficult it would be to retrofit PDR to 2014 Stingrays.

There are plenty of options on the new Stingray we’d happily live without, but it seems like PDR should appeal to even a casual driver who never takes their car to the track, for Tail of the Dragon–type drives, the occasional blast to extra-legal speeds, or the occasional exploding meteor. And now that the technology exists, look for a flood of PDR setups to appear on the option sheets of performance cars in the next few years.